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About Edith Wharton

From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton’s own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

About Edith Wharton

From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton’s own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About Edith Wharton

The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf. Born in 1862, Edith Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her. With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.

Praise

“Magnificent. . . . By far the most comprehensive study of [Wharton’s] full, populous and robust life. . . . Wharton lived a spirited and passionate life, and Lee captures that passion.” —Newsday

“Thorough and intelligent. . . . This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time.” —Diane Johnson, The Washington Post Book World

“Richly detailed, carefully nuanced. . . . Edith Wharton is not only the best book on its subject, but one of the finest literary biographies to appear in recent years.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait… More about Hermione Lee

About Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait… More about Hermione Lee

About Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait… More about Hermione Lee